1. I did put the water in the safe. 2. I did take note of the paper on the desk showing that it should be empty, full, full, empty.3. It is impossible for me to get that pattern.

The problem is that the third bar cannot be filled to the top. It always stops one time before the last. I can fill the second bar without a problem. There's enough fluid there to transfer to the third, but the third simply won't take it.

I've even gone through several walkthroughs, thinking maybe I missed something else that I had to do first, but I can't find anything that I've missed. I'm starting to feel like this is a glitch. I can't figure out why the third bar would simply stop filling up.

Any tips to get past this without having to restart (it's my only save location currently).

I eventually just had to give up and start the game over again. There was definitely something I missed the first time (never saw the little caged thing in the caves the first time), so I'm assuming that it was a result of me not doing something earlier. Then again, the little creature was with the blacksmith later anyway, so it seemed pretty irrelevant to the game as a whole. There was no reason for it to refuse to continue like that, and if it was intentional there should have been some kind of message worked in. So it definitely seems like a bug.